Carried out during an internship in the SMILE team (Stochastic Models for the Inference of Life Evolution) at the CIRB (Center for Interdisciplinary Research in Biology) of the College de France. This intership was help in the course of the first year of a bioinformatics master's degree.
The decline of species is more than ever a topical issue and many expert groups are alerting the population and the States to the dangers that it represents for global biodiversity but also for our own species. The detection and quantification of this decline is a major issue in the protection of biodiversity. This detection can be done through recent demographic estimation methods. These methods offer reliable and complementary analyses. Among them, the modeling of ecological niches allows a thorough understanding of the distribution areas of species and thus of critical areas. These models are based on the use of occurrence data, data offering a large amount of information at a lower cost because they are essentially based on the use of existing data. Their understanding is done through the integration of various predictors, commonly bioclimatic variables. These variables allow future and past projections of our models, giving a better vision of the demographic evolution of the species. These models can also be integrated into more complex analyses based on Bayesian methods. Among them are methods of analysis of genetic data, requiring far fewer individuals but not allowing future projections. The establishment of ecological niches is thus an important part of the study of species conservation.